Talk Elections

I guess we don't really know how aggressive Nebraska will be in trying to make sure that Obama doesn't pilfer an electoral vote from them in 2012, but this is what I would do if I were them:

()
()

Obama won Douglas County (Omaha) by just over 10K votes.  McCain won the non-Douglas part of the district with about 56.2% of the vote, but that wasn't enough - if you keep Douglas intact, McCain would have needed 60% in the non-Douglas portions.  He won Sarpy County as a whole by 57.3% so the part of Sarpy that is in NE-02 was a bit bluer than the rest, but simply switching around which parts of Sarpy get put into NE-02 will be insufficient.  So what I did is add the bordering counties that *are* McCain 60+ to Omaha, plus the rural part of Sarpy and then one unsplit suburb (Papillion).  Whether McCain won this reconfigured district probably depends on how Papillion voted (it seems to be solidly upper middle class... don't know what that means in Nebraska) but chances are good. 

I also made NE-01 look a little nicer and more compact in the process.  I don't like the north-south stretching it does currently, and it would get even skinnier this go-around since NE-03 has to expand.  I suspect this configuration makes it slightly more conservative, too, since it avoids the reservations in the northeast. 

Two county splits in total, just like the current map.  The only complaints might be due to the Bellevue-Omaha split... anyone know how much they care? 

There's a historic reason for the north-south splitting, of course. Keeps the fertile farm country in one seat.

It's kind of funny to split your electoral votes to encourage candidates to campaign in your state and then gerrymander the map to ensure that one party has no chance to actually win any of the districts.

It's going to be their last hurrah, either way, since if demographic trends continue, they'll be losing a district in 2020, so their map will probably end up looking something like this:

()

...unless Democrats control the process, or (perhaps rather more likely) there's split control and the ME/NE rule has been repealed. In which case, expect one seat of Omaha, Lincoln, and next to nothing else.

While I wait for South Carolina to be released and made ready, I thought I'd play with Nebraska.

This map tries for a minimal amount of change from the current map.  NE-2 gives up some precincts in Sarpy County to NE-1.  NE-1 surrenders all it has of Cedar County, plus all of Wayne and Madison Counties to NE-3, leaving Sarpy as the only split county. Inset map provided for Sarpy County.

NE-1 608,820  + 40
NE-2 608,867  + 87
NE-3 608,654  -126

There are several precincts along the border of the two districts that could be moved from NE-1 to NE-3 if one wished to reduce the deviation even more by splitting two counties.  Probably the choice of how to split Sarpy could also be done differently to reduce the difference, but I tried to avoid having NE-1 and NE-2 trade precincts or splitting Bellevue.

()

()

I think you have Colonel Peter Sarpy and Senator Saxby Chambliss confused.

Incidentally, Sarpy was assigned the prefix 59 for its license plates, based on its 59th place ranking in car registrations in 1922 when the numbering system was implemented.  The system was discontinued in 2000 in Douglas, Sarpy, and Lancaster.

Well, I am more familiar with the latter than the former.  Fixed in my original post.


Interesting.  While not in use on license plates, the number system used here in a number of applications, including road numbering and tax forms, is a simple 1 to 46 of the counties in alphabetical order.  (The last county created was Allendale in 1919.  As of the 2000 census, 12 of our 46 counties had too little population to be created on their current boundaries today.  There are three more that will also have that distinction as of the 2010 census if the Census Bureau estimates are accurate.)

Well, what's new? White liberals want to crack minorities...Hey guys! That 29% VAP Latino district, might, if you're lucky, become 50% VAP just in time for the next census when the district will be redrawn anyway....




http://www.omaha.com/article/20110428/NEWS01/704299983/1003

INCOLN — A redistricting proposal that would create a Nebraska legislative district in South Omaha with a Hispanic majority brought cries of protest from three Democratic state senators Thursday.

Mello's District 5 currently has 29 percent Hispanic voters. The neighboring east Omaha district represented by Sen. Jeremy Nordquist, District 7, has 38 percent Latinos. Those numbers would shift to 13 percent and 57 percent, respectively, under the Lautenbaugh-Nelson plan.




How 57% constitutes 'packing', well, I dunno...

Three maps for three districts. (http://www.omaha.com/article/20110503/NEWS01/110509909/595)

()

The first two plans are from Democrats, while the third is from a Republican.

The legislature passed the Republican plan. (http://journalstar.com/news/unicameral/article_850b93b4-aaef-57d1-b72a-7f2ce72b96b9.html)

I hope no one thinks the positioning of both Thurston and Saline in the third is accidental. -_-
I wonder about the Sarpy remap... is Bellevue that swingy?

Ah, it's not quite the same as the plan pictured above:

()

(I wish news organizations would stop putting these maps into PDF, it's really annoying.)


The article says:


And this:

So, did the First Nations successfully lobby to be kept in the 1st or what? Of course Saline was in the 3rd even before. Though Dakota is another relatively Democratic country ;D (but less so than it once was).

Just for fun, I compared the old partisan numbers for NB-02 versus the new ones, since Sabato said Obama might work the CD which might help Nelson a tad, since it didn't change much. I doubt Obama will be spending much time in Omaha this time, but whatever.  The Dave Bradlee utility has the partisan numbers wrong (probably missing absentee votes), but the change factor should still reveal the delta function a bit. There isn't much of one 0- maybe 20 basis points in the GOP direction. The Pubs didn't want to split the Omaha based county (Douglas), so they just switched out Sarpy County (the west end being put in NB-02, and the east end being put out), to cancel out the the partisan damage that less of Sarpy could be included (the size of the the CD needed to be cut by 25,000 persons).

Old CD
()

New CD
()